Chaos Cure
by taciturnGenocide
Summary: In a world where the competitive battling scene is a constantly evolving mesh of complex strategies and advanced training regimens, novice trainer Janet Prosper is ready to live out her dreams of grandeur. Although the odds are stacked against her, it is her unshakable belief that, one day, sheer obstinacy alone will prove to be her saving grace.


**Chaos Cure**

The Enterprising Tale of Janet Prosper

Ferociously gnawing on a stick of Chesto berry chewing gum ("Keeps you up and peppy!"), Janet Prosper stared at the whiteboard- and the teacher in front of it- with a glassy, neutral expression. Her hands slowly tore their way through an otherwise untouched sheet of lined paper, shredding it into tiny little squares that fluttered helplessly to the orange-tiled floor. It was hard to tell whether Janet was aware that she was doing this, although the kids sitting next to her had picked up on it and were even now quietly sliding their seats and desks away from hers.

Advanced Pokémon Science was among those subjects taught to those students at Allspice International who had sat their Basic Pokémon Exams, passed them, received their brand-new starter, and then, for some reason or another, elected not to beat the Allspice City Gym. Some of the students were prospective breeders, who had no intention of completing the Gym circuit at any point in their lives, while others wanted to hold off on their Trainer journeys for a couple of months while they gathered and trained up a full team. There were one or two Coordinators among the members of the class, too, although the vast majority of their ilk had left to Hoenn or Sinnoh shortly after completing the relevant BPE.

As may have been made obvious by the delivery of this fact to your mind, Janet was currently sitting in a lesson of Advanced Pokémon Science. Unusually, however, she didn't fit into any of the previously mentioned categories. Pokémon Contests, according to Janet's particular philosophy, were for wusses. So was breeding. And so was any semblance of a coherent strategy beyond one simple phrase: "Kick its ass, Slash!"

With all of this in mind, it might appear strange that such a, well, _headstrong _young lady would ever willingly delay her momentous adventure across the Seligan Region for the meagre sake of safety in numbers.

"Janet!" A shrill voice exploded into her ears. "Is that gum in your mouth?" The hawk-like Ms. Graves had apparently elected to sneak up on her surliest student at some point during the last five minutes.

The girl gave a start and abruptly swallowed it. "Uh, no." No more Chesto-flavored goodness for this young trainer, at least not until an opportunity to slip herself a new strip presented itself. The thought that it would remain in her digestive system for seven years didn't even occur to her. To be fair, though, that _was_ actually an urban myth.

"Janet," said Ms. Graves in a slower and altogether far more dangerous tone, "where is your essay on the properties of Fire-type attacks?" Her line of sight indicated that she, like the students near to Janet, had noticed the torn scraps of paper that currently littered the floor of what you might call Janet's 'workspace', insofar as it was a space that Janet was doing things in.

Improvising, Janet pointed vaguely at the classmate on her immediate left. "Haha, yeah, Jake took it, Miss. You know how he is."

The student on her left was a girl called Sadie, who had successfully managed to edge her chair a solid sixteen feet away from Janet since the beginning of the lesson and as such was in no position to take anything from her. Ms. Graves was not amused. In fact, she was distinctly unamused, and expressed this in the form of ordering Janet to march herself to the Principal's office right this instant, young lady. Janet slung her bag over one shoulder and sprung to her feet with surprising alacrity, then strode from the room in silence. Ms. Graves watched her leave with a grim sort of satisfaction, and then turned back to the class.

"Alright, boys and girls. Let's get back to work, shall we? There's only half an hour left."

Janet's sheet of lined paper had vanished from her desk. Someone might have noticed, but if they did it went unmentioned in the haze of scratching pens and the half-remembered Faustian Principles by which all Fire-type moves could be explained and analysed.

* * *

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As a more savvy educator may have anticipated, Janet would never, and indeed _could_ never, have taken any course of action so insipid and spineless as actually going to the Principal's office when told to. Instead, like any rebellious teenager worth her salt, Janet took it as an open invitation to leave for pastures greener than any office. In her case, this meant the Allspice City Pokémon Gym. She'd been going there every day after school for the past month, challenging the Gym Leader there as frequently as she was able- which was, at her current total of Gym badges (a paltry sum of zero), once a day.

Evading the school's meagre cadre of security cameras was second nature to the practised mind of Janet, and she was free and on the streets of Allspice City in a matter of minutes. Sweeping her gaze along the bustling length of Cademia Road, Janet noted sourly that one of Allspice's classic traffic jams had inflicted itself on the city just in time for the lunchtime rush, rendering one of Allspice International's few positive points- a regular bus service connecting it to the Pokémon Gym- useless. For all of its flaws, Allspice International had failed her yet again. Janet sighed in tired exasperation.

Adopting a confident, no-nonsense posture to allay any questions about what a girl in school uniform was doing out of school during school hours, she set off down the street, weaving her way through thronging crowds in case somebody in the school happened to look out at the road. Even if she hadn't known the route to the Gym since she was six, signs mounted at the ends of each street helpfully pointed visiting trainers towards it. It was, after all, Allspice's biggest year-round attraction.

"He's not in?" said Janet, half an hour of deft navigation through the lively core of Allspice City later.

"That is what I just said, yes," answered the aide in front of her with a humourless, tight-lipped smile. "Due to certain obligations that Gerald has, as the Gym Leader of this city, Gym matches have been suspended for the day."

Janet stabbed an interrogative finger in the aide's direction. "What other 'obligations' could he possibly have?"

"I'm led to understand that he's been an MC for the annual All-Stars tournament for the last few years," said the aide smugly, unable to repress a slight grin. He knew Janet of old, and wasn't a particularly big fan of her at all.

"Wait. That's today?" Janet whipped out her battered Pokégear, hoping against all hope that the aide was wrong or lying. When she saw the date, she swore and, glaring, made a complicated hand gesture at the aide, seemingly going through her entire vocabulary of rude hand signs.

Hearing her unasked question, the aide said, "The tickets are all sold out by now, I expect."

Thoroughly thwarted by this new development, Janet's only real option was to make a tactical retreat, in order to muster her wits and assess the situation once more. Taking care to storm off in as blatantly furious a manner as possible, she flounced with ferocity into the nearest building- which, as it so happened, was a bookstore.

It takes a certain flavour of person to find oneself entirely at home in a book shop. Not necessarily clothed in the full regalia of a nerd, glasses and pocket protectors and thick textbooks detailing the precise details of a Caterpie's maturation cycle and all, but certainly giving off the faint impression that they, if they were so inclined, would have absolutely no trouble picking up and then reading such a book, and look absolutely fabulous in the process.

Janet was not this type of person. You may go as far as to say that she was fundamentally incapable of even becoming this type of person, on the grounds that books about Caterpie are, and will always be, for terrible nerds. Upon entering the book shop and discovering, much to her dismay, that it sold books, she leaned against a shelf, crossed her arms, and then (when nobody was looking) stole the occasional glance at a nearby copy of the latest issue of _The Modern Trainer_. This continued for three minutes before a surprisingly muscular hulk of a man walked up to her, scratched his tattooed neck, and then quietly said, "Clear off, punk."

Unwilling to slink off in defeat like she'd been forced to by the aide at the Gym, but at the same time recognising how poorly an altercation with this man would go, Janet settled for giving him a dirty glare at his receding bulk before taking off. Although she was an angry, disillusioned youth, Janet was not particularly stupid. At least, not when it came to threat assessment.

Two minutes later, when she found herself loitering across the road from a billboard displaying a terrifying visage of Booky the Book (much beloved mascot of the Seligan region's national bookstore chain _Bibliography_), she discovered an interesting phenomenon. If she stood with her right side facing Booky, and frowned in the disaffected, natural manner that came as instinctively to her as breathing or swearing under her breath at annoying things did, she could hear a tiny voice- right at the edge of her auditory range- crying for help. She looked around carefully. The street seemed ordinary enough. It was closer to the centre of town than Cademia, with a larger quantity and wider variety of cars to signify it as such. Amid the honking of horns and screeching of tires that tends to accompany a busy roadside, it struck Janet as slightly odd that she would be able to hear this voice. It was also concerning that nobody else, in their winter gear and Christmas cheer, seemed to notice anything at all.

_and then it happened_

Janet gave the place another sweep, this time searching for the type of suspicious, dark-swallowed nook that somebody would probably commit a crime in. A dark alleyway, perhaps. Maybe an open manhole, emanating a faint hint of eau d'sewer in addition to the cries for help that she could still hear, even when a bus roared past her at the same time as an old woman in a Sentret fur coat walking a horde of yapping Furfrou. She found what she was looking for within seconds; a real doozy of an alley that practically bled "crime scene". The little of it exposed to the sun's rays was plastered in graffiti. For half a second, Janet thought she could even see a severed hand lying on its chipped threshold- but then she blinked and it was gone. A more observant individual (or, perhaps, somebody prone to filming everything they see on a much-loved antique camera that they'd bought at a garage sale at the tender age of six) might well have realised that, until Janet thought to look for a crime scene, this alley had been quite invisible.

Sadly, Janet did not fit this description either. She did not own a camera, besides the one built into her iPoké 5 that she only really used to play music anyway. Nor was she particularly observant. This was one detail that would go unnoticed in the annuls of Time, forever and beyond.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

What matters, for now, is that Janet could hear somebody crying for help, and then discovered where they were. Hand in her pocket, the cold steel of Pokéball reassuring her with its touch, she charged across the road and into the inky black of the alley. Though the crying stopped soon afterwards, it didn't matter; there was only one path.

A man, almost invisible in the gloom of the alleyway in his shapeless black hat and what looked to be an equally black overcoat, stood at the end of this path, to the side of the alley, one hand pressing a little kid in school uniform against a wall. With the other, he was waving his balls around in the kid's face.

No, not _those_ balls. God. His _Pok__é_balls.

Janet leapt into action. "OI!" she spat at the man. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

The man turned around, apprehension telegraphed in his suddenly hunched shoulders and careful movements. Upon seeing that Janet was alone, he relaxed visibly. "Ha," he muttered, almost to himself, a most unpleasant smirk creeping onto his face. "Whoddya think _you_ are, kid?" He shifted his grip on his balls, finding their buttons.

"Your worst nightmare!" For her lack of interest in actually studying to become a good trainer, Janet could talk a fierce game. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a ball of her own. A _Pok__é_ball, dammit.

"Let go of those balls! Slash, kick his ass!"

After the blinding light associated with the unleashing of a Pokémon subsided, there was a slight pause. Janet's Charmander, freed from its ball, looked impudently up at her and snorted. A small plume of flame puffed out of his snout, and it (along with Janet's hopes and dreams) vanished nigh instantaneously. The Charmander curled up and went to sleep. Janet ground her teeth together and, bitterly, returned him.

The man, correctly judging that this Charmander was not going to stop him at all, laughed uproariously. He held out his balls. "Come on out,- OW!"

If this strikes you as an unusual battlecry, that would be because although the man had been right about the Charmander, he had misjudged the distance between Janet and himself. He had also misjudged how much it hurts to be kicked in the balls. Yes, _those_ balls.

He immediately doubled over, clutching two of his balls in agony and allowing the ones that had been in his hands to fall free. Janet kneed him in the face, a touch viciously, and then kneed him in the face again, a little more viciously. He went down for the count, leaving Janet with an incapacitated man, a trembling kid, and a couple of dropped balls. Pokéballs. Dropped Pokéballs.

_but then it vanished_

He went down for the count, leaving Janet with an incapacitated man, the distinct feeling that something had just gone missing, and a couple of dropped balls. Pokéballs. Dropped Pokéballs.

She checked her pocket. Ball was still there. She took it out and pressed the release button. Slash was still there, and still sleeping besides. She checked for her iPoké 6. That was still in her other pocket. The thought that she'd been in that alleyway for a reason suddenly struck her, but it left as quickly as it came. Apparently, she'd just decided to go into an alleyway to wreck some guy in black. That, she suddenly believed with the utmost conviction, was exactly what had just happened.

On an impulse, she picked up both of the Pokéballs lying on the floor. One of these, she knew, belonged to the unconscious man. The other... had he stolen it? Somebody else might have chosen to sit down and try to think everything through for a minute, given all of these odd thoughts and memories of a memory that kept on seeping out of the back of her mind. Janet was not the type of person to choose this, so she didn't. Instead, she shrugged and pressed the release switches on both balls.

A cry of attack tore through the air and into Janet's ears. Bowled over by an invisible force, she collided with the ground in a confused tangle of limbs. For a moment, everything hurt.

Something that felt suspiciously like a tooth suddenly cut into her shoulder, giving her a focal point to rally around. Bellowing in agony and rage, she fought her way to her feet. Once she felt she was relatively steady, she opened her mouth and out gushed a stream of curses, even as a stream of blood gushed down her arm. With her good hand, she blindly reached out and batted at something flapping around her head, then closed her fingers around something with a decidedly leathery texture. Upon opening her eyes, she took a moment to appraise her injury- god _damn_ did it hurt- and then looked at her assailant, a very feisty (albeit somewhat battered) Zubat. One of its fangs was stained scarlet.

Janet stopped swearing. She had found the culprit. At the moment, it seemed to be straining to reach something on the floor, its eyeless face, vicious maw and twitching ears all turned to Janet's feet. Frowning, she shifted her grip on it- it was slowly working its way free from her grasp- and followed the direction of its sightless gaze.

"Solo?" A tiny, quivering _thing_ stared up at her with imploring eyes, ensconced within what appeared to be a sphere of green jelly. In silence that somehow, despite everything, came over her almost instinctively, Janet stepped carefully away and, grimacing at the strain on her injured arm, picked up the two discarded Pokéballs. They'd fallen some distance away from the three of them in the brief struggle between Janet and the Zubat earlier. She pressed the button on one of them, returning the Zubat and freeing up her arm, then pressed the other.

The Solosis vanished into the ball.

Janet had woken up every morning for a month with the thought, "_This is going to be a long day_." On this particular day, she was right.


End file.
